Whats the best way of doing it!

djpirra

Hi,

Many times i have been faced with the same question and sometimes my mind starts wonderin'...

Whats the best way of working around with submitted forms? Submit the forms to the same page or to another one? Use Post or GET?

Well lets hear your opinions!

I am facing indecisions lots of times facing forms of type...

User Login systems ( submit and treat in the same php file or to another one? )

Edit Users information and display it updated again...
( submit and treat in the same php file or to another one? ) ( Use Post or get for the submitted data? )

etc....

lets hear from gurus 😉

Regards

Mordecai

I tend to use one file for every set thing. I.e. I will have login.php for my login script, user.php for my user-editing script.

I usually use POST, unless it's meant for them to be able to type in the information manually in the URL (like a search, for instance).

djpirra

Yeah have already tried that out but in some cases the Internet Explorer starts asking if i want to submit the data again and again... damn thats too boring and not functional.
Using separate files makes it better but if i use post to send vars to another editing page i update the record and when i make the location:.. to go back i loose my post data and got lost in the code...

So this is a very messy situation here!

Please show me best techniques for editing records and showing it updated.

If you can give a simple structure for making something like a user system with the possibility to see all users and search iniatially and the add. delete or edit every user. what pages and how much php files would you have?

Sorry to be bothering... but its just for me to get this thing straight...

PS: another problem is when i use <iframes> what type should i use in there? post or get? post gets that IE problem of re-submitting....

MarkR

POST and GET have quite obvious cases where they should be used:

GET should only be used for "readonly" pages. Things like searches, displaying info etc.

POST should be used for anything which causes a "change" in data. By a change, I don't mean just updating stats, I mean an actual modification of some data. This includes logon forms, which should use POST.

So basically it's

GET for searching and displaying stuff
POST for modifications and anything else.

The reason for this, is that a user agent could repeat a GET without user interaction, and expect the same results (or more up to date results, if user hits refresh etc). But a POST should never be repeated without the user's explicit say-so, as it could cause duplicate data.

I normally have forms post to themselves. This is so that if an error occurs, I can redisplay the form with the entered data already filled in, so the user can try to correct the problem.

If a form POST succeeds, and I want to move to a different screen, typically I'd do a redirect.

I realise there is an efficiency cost with redirects, but it makes good sense. Also this stops the user from hitting "refresh" on POST submitted pages, which can cause problems.

Mark

drawmack

Get or Post. I submit all forms with post and use get for things where the user is clicking on a link.

Forms submit to self or not. For me it depends on the size of the project. I usually do everything with OOP and my HTML in template files. So for a small to medium sized project I usually just make a control file (index.php) that calls the appropriate class methods and loads the appropriate templates. If I think a control file is going to get over about 1000 lines then I'll seperate it out and have a couple of control files. However my control files are usually very logical and kept to a minimum. For example if I were building a bulletin board. I would probably have one control file for all the forum stuff, one for all the user stuff and one for the admin.